In 1986, in the midst of the Iran-Contra scandal and at the height of the AIDS crisis, when American politicians often proved to be both unscrupulous and painfully unresponsive, the photographer Judith Joy Ross set out to make portraits of members of the United States Congress. With a Guggenheim fellowship in hand but lacking any media credentials, she came up with a persuasive pretext to convince politicians to pose: the exhibit would be held at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in conjunction with the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. The ploy worked: more than a hundred congressmen agreed to have their pictures taken.

The history of portrait photography has always straddled the gap between the renowned figure and the anonymous individual. In nineteenth-century France, Nadar (né Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) created lucid studio portraits of eminent artists and writers; across the Channel, Julia Margaret Cameron produced romanticized images of her august friends, among them Charles Darwin. Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton, and Horst P. Horst took a similar approach with magazine portraiture, and Richard Avedon transformed the portrait altogether, in the fifties, by distilling the frame to nothing but his legendary subjects—James Baldwin, Marilyn Monroe, Truman Capote. Other photographers, meanwhile, made typological portraits of the most ordinary members of society: in the early twentieth century, August Sander photographed the baker, the bricklayer, the banker, and other workers; in the nineteen-sixties, Diane Arbus photographed unknown figures she met willy-nilly on the street.

Despite her subjects’ prominence, Ross’s portraits of legislators echo most closely the work of Sander and Arbus. The series, “Portraits of the United States Congress, 1986-87,” which is currently on view at New York’s Deborah Bell Photographs, is a typological study of politicians, each one, like a Sander photograph, presenting a specimen of the breed. Ross, through the decades, has worked almost exclusively in this sort of format, with each new series of portraits offering a different category of social examination. Some classifications are autobiographical, such as portraits from the part of Pennsylvania where she grew up, including a series from the early nineties that captures students posing in classrooms. “That’s me when I was little,” she once said about her photograph of a grim schoolgirl standing by a metal desk.

Although Ross approached her congressional subjects in pursuit of a truth about American democracy, she was struck by how essentially human each of her subjects turned out to be. Strom Thurmond was, at the time, president pro tempore of the Senate. Ross had been horrified by Thurmond’s staunch segregationist views, and she recalls approaching the session with trepidation. His demeanor was intimidating and his office imposing, with grand period furniture and ceremonial antiques. She set up her eight-by-ten view camera—her favored instrument throughout her career—just as a congressional photographer was finishing a shoot with the senator and two high-school students. Ross noticed Thurmond’s practiced stance and artificial smile as he reached over to shake the students’ hands. She knew that she had very little time to puncture Thurmond’s “camera” persona.

Her photograph shows an aged and obdurate man with a tinge of uncertainty in his face. Thurmond’s head is perfectly centered in her portrait. Picture frames hover, out of focus, in the background, and circles of light orbit Thurmond’s head, as if the portrait registers the paranormal aspect of his aura along with his face. It isn’t merely a forensic portrait; like Arbus, Ross also seems to have rendered the smudgy dissonance between herself and her subject. “He had charisma,” she acknowledged at her recent opening, standing in front of Thurmond’s portrait and describing the plastic keychain he gave her with the words “President Pro Tem” on it. “I ended up respecting him in a way, or admiring him, even though I didn't agree with anything he did in office.”

On the other hand, she felt a clear affinity with Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, who championed causes that Ross believed in. The portrait was taken just months before Schroeder’s infamously teary press conference, in which she announced that she would not seek the Democratic nomination for President. In Ross’s picture, Schroeder’s expression is marked by a quiet grace, her eyes looking downward and her head bathed in soft light—as if she were a Roman bust, her marble pedestal replaced by a delicate turtleneck collar and striped cardigan sweater.

Recalling a series of portraits of anti-Iraq War protesters that she made in 2006 and 2007, twenty years after the photographs of congressmen, Ross told me that she became so moved by her subjects’ reasons for protesting that “I would hug them and they would hug me back.” Though she had initially planned to explore a typology there, too, she was confronted instead by the distinctiveness of individuals. “Photographing them became like making a poem together,” she said. The same impulse may explain why her straightforward portraits of legislators also have an unexpected emotional pull. Looking at each small black-and-white photo, it’s easy to place legislators like Thurmond and Schroeder into categories: the segregationist, the feminist. Or: the Republican, the Democrat. Regarding the portraits, the viewer cannot shake a knowledge of the ideological schisms that form around issues like Iran-Contra, AIDS, and the many other crises that followed. Equally, though, the disarming simplicity with which Ross approached these figures of authority imbues each portrait with a tempered intimacy of its own.

Philip Gefter, the author of “Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe” (Liveright, 2014), is at work on a biography of Richard Avedon.